Oral History Interview with John P. McEnery
Monterey, California [Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Additional McEnery Oral History Transcripts] Notice Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview. RESTRICTIONS Opened May, 1976 [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Additional McEnery Oral History Transcripts]
Oral History Interview with Monterey, California FUCHS: Mr. McEnery, to start would you mind giving a little background sketch, when and where you were born, and something of your education and career up to the time we are most interested in? MCENERY: Well, I was born in San Jose, California, 1906, lived there all of my life. After school, I attended Santa Clara University, and prep school there, and then university. During the depression, after two years of college, I was forced to leave. I then went in the hotel business, where I was at the St. Clair Hotel until 1933 and then went into business for myself; and I have been connected in business in Santa Clara County since that day. I was primarily in the hotel business, and the hardware business, known as the Farmer's Union Hardware, which is perhaps the oldest hardware store in California, having been formed in 1878. FUCHS: Is that throughout a certain area, or just in one city? MCENERY: No. It's just in one locality, in San Jose. San Jose, California is the only place it's operated. It's odd that it was originally started as a cooperative of farmers and then became a stock corporation later on. As I say, I've been primarily in the hotel business, and the hardware business, but I have skirted around the end of real estate and so forth, always within walking distance of my home, practically. I liked the idea of looking at what I own instead of trying to open a safe deposit box and looking at papers. I became active in the county central committee during the Al Smith campaign. FUCHS: Was that your first venture in politics? MCENERY: That was my first venture in politics, yes. I had done a little work in politics for local candidates and so forth, such as counsel and supervisor members, before that. But then I became very active in Democratic politics and after Clyde Redwine, who had been chairman of the county Democratic committee in Santa Clara County for a number of years, decided that he was getting a little bit too old for the job, I was elected chairman. I was chairman of the county central committee of Santa Clara County off and on for about ten or fifteen years. I attended all of the state central committee meetings during those years and was a delegate to those central committee meetings all the time, and in 1946, after the debacle of the primary election… FUCHS: What was that? MCENERY: That was the defeat of Attorney General [Robert W.] Kenny, who ran for Governor. At that time we had cross filing in California and the Republican, Mr. [Earl S.] Warren, received the Democratic and Republican nomination, which eliminated our candidate for Governor. FUCHS: Why was Warren so popular? MCENERY: It wasn't a matter of being Warren was so popular; the Democrats hadn't built anybody up for the Governor's job, and Attorney General Kenny became the nominee of the party just out of loyalty, figuring that they had to put up somebody. In fact, Kenny immediately after being picked as the candidate to run for Governor against Earl Warren left for Europe and was gone for a month or six weeks and didn't come back until shortly before the election. He did very little campaigning, had very little money. It's the old story about people that are interested in politics don't put up money for what they consider to be a losing candidate. Kenny would have made a wonderful candidate if he had gotten in and pitched and had any support of the Democrats. But evidently Earl Warren was very strong; and you ask why he was so strong, why, he practically took over the Democratic program in the state. You might as well say that between his election and first term and his second election, he could have easily run on the Democratic platform that we used in the election for Kenny. Having the cross filing issue, at least it gave us something to fight for, and I think I was very instrumental in helping to end cross filing in California. I kept fighting it every place I went, and I used it as a kind of a whipping boy, in every speech that I made, for any state or any county central committee. I told you about the defeat of Sinclair, and then his campaign manager becoming the candidate for office in '38 and being elected. FUCHS: Who was that? MCENERY: Culbert Olson, and Culbert Olson was, to my way of looking at it, a very fine Governor and a very good Democrat. He alienated himself with a lot of the old, what the opposition might call, party hacks, but we remained very loyal to him in Northern California with the exception of San Francisco, and that mostly was a fight with Bill Malone and George Riley as to who was going to be chairman of the county committee. Culbert Olson took the side of George Riley and helped defeat Bill Malone. Well, all the Bill Malone boys just went out -- and after all he had control of the Democratic Party for years up there and was chairman of the committee -- and they just went off and sat on their hands. FUCHS: What year was that? MCENERY: That was in 1938. Earl Warren ran and was elected in 1942. He defeated Culbert Olson. We:were loyal to Culbert Olson and I thought he made a good Governor; but the thing that defeated Culbert Olson more than anything else, was what we used to call in those days the leftwingers, and maybe sometimes we called them Communists; although we weren't sure what they were. They all took the line that the national administration should have opened the second front to relieve the pressure on the Russians. Well, the United States wasn't ready to open the second front, but all the leftwingers kept agitating against Culbert Olson and the thing finally mounted until Culbert Olson just couldn't win. He was in almost as bad a fix as Kenny was in 1938, I would say. FUCHS: Was there anyone of prominence that was involved in this leftwing agitation for a second front? MCENERY: I can't remember who they were right now. I imagine if I looked through some names that were prominent. I would say that it was some of the groups whose names are still familiar in the labor movement, particularly the CIO. I can't remember the names right now. FUCHS: Was Harry Bridges involved in that at that time? MCENERY: Harry Bridges was very active, yes; that is a name that I could have mentioned but he was not active in Democratic politics. He supported Democratic candidates most of the time, but a good example of his support, and nonsupport of candidates, was in the case of Frank Havenner. Frank Havenner was a very liberal Congressman from San Francisco and had always received labor support. When Frank Havenner wouldn't come out in favor of the opening of a second front, Bridges opposed him. He had supported him two years before for Mayor of San Francisco, but when he was running for Congress for the third time he opposed him. I can't think of any other names. But getting along to some of the things that we're more interested in, and the background, I started off to tell you about my election to chairman of the party in Northern California, that was in 1946. I went to the state convention having no idea at all that I might even be nominated for chairman, but it came down to, I guess, that the old politicians figured we had better elect somebody from the country that don't know what it's all about. They had known me, and I had some opposition to some of their statements and some of their plans in the past, and we had not been very successful in Santa Clara County, in electing Democrats. First of all we had no paper. We had no radio, we had no support of any kind, and we had a tremendously strong candidate for Congress who was consistently being reelected, by the name of Jack Z. Anderson. He was a Republican and he was in for years. Later on he served with Eisenhower when he became President, as liaison between himself and the Congress. He was a farmer but a very strong candidate, and our problem was always getting an outstanding Democrat to run, of which there were many, but we couldn't convince them that they ought to run, because they didn't think they had a chance against Mr. Jack Anderson. Anyhow, we went to the convention in 1946 and we had a good loyal cohesive group from Santa Clara County. At that time we, and for some time past, had worked with San Mateo County and they had a pretty good group. They nominated myself and somebody from Oakland, there were three of us nominated. I don't even remember who the opposition was at the time. Anyhow, we won on the first ballot and I was elected; and when the caucus come in from southern California it was Mr. Jim [James] Roosevelt who we had heard was going to be the state chairman. He was elected from the south. Every other year they used to call the chairman in the north the state chairman, and every other year they called the man from the south state chairman. So, when Roosevelt was elected he became the state chairman. I technically was known as vice-chairman, or chairman of northern California as it later turned out to be, because we operated as two separate committees in the state. FUCHS: Who did you succeed? MCENERY: I succeeded Bill Malone. FUCHS: And Roosevelt succeeded who? MCENERY: I'm not sure, was it [Henry I.] Dockweiler? I can't remember now who he succeeded. Anyhow, I was quite impressed by Jim Roosevelt. In fact, I had no inkling as to what kind of a man he was. He impressed me with his drawing power primarily; everybody seemed to want to see the senior son of our great President. He had arrived in California and we didn't know a lot about his background in Massachusetts or New York. Of course, it didn't take me long after I became vice-chairman, or chairman of northern California to be told by a number of prominent people just what I could expect. But I'm the sort of guy that doesn't believe all the rumors I hear, and I went along believing in Jim Roosevelt and thinking he was a great guy and he was just what the party needed. I felt almost sure that he would be our next Governor of California. I really believe that he could have been the next Governor of California had he not made such a fool out of himself in the year of '47 and at the convention in 1948, because I think that the Democratic Party was getting pretty close together (both north and south), until Mr. Roosevelt came on the scene. I said that many people told me about Jim Roosevelt; I hadn't been chairman in northern California for six months when I met with an old friend of mine, who had come to attend a meeting of the committee of the United Nations. Everybody knows this gentleman, it was Jim [James A.] Farley. I had been friendly with Mr. Farley in the earlier campaigns. We had had him earlier in Santa Clara County; we had had him for the dedication for the new Post Office in San Jose. Jim Farley's a great guy for writing letters and I communicated with him; and I used to see him every time he came to California. I met with him at his request, he said he wanted to see me. He congratulated me on being elected chairman of the party in northern California; and he thought I could do some good, but he warned me at the time not to trust this Jim Roosevelt, that he just couldn't be trusted. I didn't understand what he meant at the time, but I learned about it real well in the next two years. We had constantly made agreements, and when we had troubles we tried to settle them by (between the north and the south, whether it was financial or whether it was about speakers from the national committee) conferences between ourselves; but I found out that after you made agreements with Mr. Roosevelt, they didn't amount to anything. He not only wouldn't say that he didn't make the agreement, but he'd say he never met with you. So there wasn't much of a. basis to argue. I say I was warned by not only Jim Farley, but also a number of other prominent people, the Dockweiler's in the south, and any number of people that I knew told me to be careful of him. However, we started off this campaign, after this debacle, and I was elected after the primary election in 1946. I found out why I was elected when I went to San Francisco to take over the Democratic office. I found out that we not only hadn't paid our rent in three months, we hadn't paid our phone bill, and a very outstanding Democrat by the name of Mr. Doorman, who had lent us the furniture for the office, came up the first day I was there to pick up the furniture, which he had lent us. He heard that we were going to be evicted from our office for nonpayment of rent and so forth, and he wanted to get his furniture. So I, sizing up the situation as it was, decided to call a meeting of the northern California executive committee and let them know just what the situation was and to try to plan some kind of a money raising dinner or something to see if we couldn't at least get ourself on a pay-as-you-go basis. I like to tell the story about after I couldn't make a phone call and I was being evicted from my office, that I decided to write a telegram. I went over to the Western Union office which was about a block and a half away from headquarters to send out fifty telegrams, all alike, but to different members of the committee, urging them to come to San Francisco for a Saturday and Sunday meeting a couple of weeks hence. And by God, the Western Union wouldn't even let me send a telegram and charge it. I had to pay with my personal check. So that was the state of the Democratic State Central Committee in San Francisco when I took over in '46. FUCHS: Why had they become insolvent? MCENERY: They knew that they had to do everything desperate, anything they were grabbing at straws to try to help get Kenny nominated. They knew from the polls and everything that they were being defeated, and they were trying so hard to get Attorney General Kenny nominated for Governor, that they spent every cent they had and they went into debt. Naturally, after losing the candidate for Governor, a lot of people that had promised to put us some money didn't put it up, and they were left with this deficit. FUCHS: Had the southern California group done the same thing? MCENERY: Southern California, I understand, not only didn't raise any money, but they didn't go out and do anything for Kenny at all. So, we found out afterwards that he had very little or no campaign. Most of it was done by personal friends of his who had met him through the legal profession. He was a very outstanding lawyer and a great Attorney General and he is now serving as Superior Court Judge, by the way, in southern California. He was appointed to the Superior Court by Brown just before he left as Governor four years ago. FUCHS: Kenny wasn't a political factor in the state after that, though? MCENERY: He was never a political factor in the state after that. As you know, we had another man that ran for Attorney General, who was elected, and is now serving on the Court of Appeals. This gentleman's name is [Stanley] Mosk, he came along and was elected later on, along with Brown, to the Attorney General's office. In fact, if you'll look at the reelection then four years afterwards, Mosk got almost a million votes more than Brown did when he got reelected. So, Mr. Mosk made a good Attorney General, too; but Kenny was real good. But Kenny was more of an intellectual and a lawyer than he was a politician. Maybe he concentrated too much on his offices in Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Francisco; the people out in the great San Joaquin Valley didn't even know who he was. So, again, we're going back to 1946. I'd like to go on a little bit without saying too much more about this state central committee affair of 1946. One point I'd like to bring out is that we had our campaign and having very little or no money, we held this dinner afterwards where I sent the telegram, and we raised about $25,000. I think we gave ten to the national committee, and we kept fifteen ourselves. Along with other money that we raised I imagine we distributed among the candidates between sixty and seventy thousand dollars. The three candidates left were Jack Shelley for Lieutenant Governor, Pat Brown for Attorney General, and Will Rogers, Jr. was running for the United States Senator. When the campaign started out, I thought that Will Rogers was almost a cinch for United States Senate, but evidently a lot of the Helen Gahagan forces who had supported her for the Senate -- she ran against Manchester Boddy and was defeated -- just didn't come around to Will Rogers' help at all in the campaign. But as it turned out, as we went down the straightaway in 1946 to the final election, it looked to me that Pat Brown was kind of the dark horse and could possibly win, although you still have to remember that we had Earl Warren's name at the head of our ticket running for the Governor of California. And it is kind of hard to start voting for a Republican up on top and then switch over to voting for Democrats for the other three offices. Anyhow, in northern California we thought up the idea, not having any money, to start what we called "the caravan," and we got all of the Democrats that we could together, got their automobiles decorated and we started off on schedule with a kind of a front-runner, who was Pat Frayne, a former newspaperman, who was also working in our office. He went ahead with correspondence and everything, We laid out schedules, and we went through all of northern California, everywhere. We went up to Santa Rosa and even to Crescent City, which was the farthest northern spot you can go before you go into Oregon. Then we came back and we even went to the little town of Weaverville, which nobody heard of except as a place to go hunting. And we ended up, with the help of Clair Engle and his airplane, flying around the state. We flew into Alturas. They had never had a Democrat or Republican state office candidate come to the little town of Alturas. That's practically right up against the Nevada border. We went into every one of these localities and we were able, in towns where we didn't even have a central committee anymore, as a result of this -- this '46 campaign and our caravan -- to get the Democrats out from under the rocks. We finally got some leaders in each one of those towns and we got them to start central committees where there weren't ones, where there wasn't a committee. This all paid off later on in '48 because the attendances at our dinners came up much better. We consistently used to have a dinner once a year for fundraising. I don't think anybody outside of a few officers of the state central committee and myself, included, knows that during the year '46 and '47 and the twelve month period we held three dinners and raised money. Everybody will tell you that they went to the annual dinner, but we had three dinners. We were practically -- we were broke after the final election was over again, and I've got to say that all three of the candidates, Rogers, Shelley and Brown were all defeated. This was due to the fact that you couldn't get the three candidates to run together. They all thought that they had a chance of winning with the exception of Will Rogers. Will Rogers cooperated with us fine in the north, but I hear that he didn't cooperate with the state central committee in the south; but told me afterwards that he couldn't cooperate with Roosevelt. When Shelley and Brown had meetings in northern California, we didn't want Roosevelt to be there, because Roosevelt had to make a half or a quarter of an hour speech and everybody seemed to want to see Roosevelt. Brown and Shelley thought they were the candidates and they were the ones that ought to see the people. But as long as everybody came to see Roosevelt they weren't particularly interested in the candidates, and little by little I found out that I didn't have either Shelley or Brown in attendance at our meetings when Jim Roosevelt came. So, it was a matter of just the chairman and the vice-chairman trying to pep the Democrats up to vote for some candidates that wouldn't come to the meeting because Roosevelt was there. FUCHS: You spoke of the debacle in the '46 primary, was that just the fact that Kenny was defeated, or was there a general defeat? MCENERY: No, just the fact that Kenny was defeated, but there evidently were a lot of Democrats that voted for some of the other Republicans besides voting for Earl Warren. In other words you could cross party lines, you could vote for anybody you wanted. Every Republican ballot. The Republicans, however, seemed to be better educated and they knew who were the Republicans on their ballot and who the Democrats were; but the Democrats didn't seem to understand that the Republicans and the Democrats were both on their ballot. And they had picked the name of the person that they had heard the most of and they didn't know whether they were Democrats or Republicans. But that, thank God, is all behind us. We don't have the cross-filing to contend with anymore; and it almost makes me sick in my stomach, that every once in a while I hear some Democrat say that maybe you should have a change in the primaries to be able to vote for a good Republican if you want to. Well, this destroys party loyalty, and in fact, it destroys party organization. This was the reason that through the years the Democrats were never able to get a good strong central committee; that the Republicans were constantly getting elected, and they were getting elected with the help of Democrats. Democrats just didn't know who the Democrats were on the ballot. FUCHS: What year did cross-filing end? MCENERY: Cross-filing ended in '52. It ended after Jim Roosevelt ran against Warren for Governor. I want to get to this next point, unless you can think of something more that I ought to say about that 1946 campaign. We had very little contact… Oh, one thing that happened in the '46 campaign that I started to mention (and I don't know whether I said it was in '46), we in northern California wanted Alben Barkley to come out and speak and I talked to the national committee at that time. I guess to McGrath, or maybe it was Gael Sullivan, and we made arrangements. They wanted to be sure that if he came to California he talked both north and south. And I went down south and talked with Jim Roosevelt, and Jim Roosevelt wouldn't have Barkley, he wanted Henry Wallace. Well, this was just about the time of the blowup when Henry Wallace was eliminated from the Cabinet and having Wallace come out I figured could do us no good at all; but all of the wild-eyed liberals in the party wanted Henry Wallace to come out, and most of them were in southern California. So, we went ahead and we made arrangements with the national committee to have Barkley come to San Francisco. However, when Barkley got to San Francisco and had made his speech, and we had used him in a couple of places; and he made a speech to the farm groups and he made it from San Jose, California, Civic Auditorium. This is the one where the radio man forgot to turn off the button, and we paid for a half an hour speech and Alben Barkley kept on talking to the audience afterwards. When we got through the National Broadcasting Company wanted us to pay for an hour talk. And that was the time that Alben Barkley said to me, "My god, what did I say in the last half hour?" He said, "I thought I was talking just to the local audience." Anyhow, after we got back to San Francisco we got some calls from the national committee and Jim Roosevelt was saying he had to get Barkley down to southern California. So a number of us, along with Senator Barkley, went down to southern California; and when I got to my room which was reserved at the Biltmore Hotel, Jim Roosevelt and Wallace and a half a dozen other people who I don't remember right now were in my parlor and waiting to meet Senator Barkley when he came. Senator Barkley walked in and shook hands with Wallace, and Wallace said something about he hadn't seen Alben Barkley since before he went to Europe or something. Senator Barkley said that by God, he hadn't seen him since the commotion in the Cabinet that happened while he was away, which meant that Mr. Wallace had been eliminated. However, Mr. Wallace did a good job in southern California in his speechmaking . He went wherever he was asked. I was given the job of going along with Mr. Wallace out to Pasadena or Glendale, I don't know which. Jim Roosevelt took Mr. Barkley in tow and he went someplace else to introduce him. He went to Pasadena and we went to Glendale, or the other way around. I was with Mr. Wallace for two days. By the way, there's another note that comes in. Senator Barkley made a call from his room that day I was with him. His wife became very ill, had been ill for a long time, but this was her last sickness; and Senator Barkley turned around to me and he said, "Will you take me out to the airport after we finish tonight?" Senator Barkley went through with his two speeches and made them that night, and I took him out to the airport about twelve o'clock at night and he started back for Paducah, Kentucky, or wherever his wife was. I think she was at home. And she was very ill and shortly after this she died. But to show you what a great soldier the guy was, he didn't leave right away, he had these two speeches to make and by God he made them. He put everything he had into them; and nobody knew, outside of myself who was in the room at the time of the phone call, how serious she was ill. It was the nurse that had phoned the Senator and told him she didn't think his wife would last very long. FUCHS: Why had you wanted Barkley in particular to come to California?
MCENERY: I had hoped that they wouldn't bring Wallace into California, because I felt that it was just going to perpetuate this fight between the national administration and Mr. Wallace. I wanted somebody that was an out and out party man. And Barkley, being the tremendous speaker he was, perhaps the greatest in the country, was easily the greatest in the Democratic Party, and the best audience pleaser you could get. And he was pretty well-known by us in northern California having come out here a number of times to make speeches. We never did get along very well with Mr. Wallace. In fact, Mr. Wallace didn't make many trips to northern California, and when he did he never had much to do with the party organization. He always seemed to have to do with some people that were interested in agriculture, or some particular project that he was on, and it seemed to be a kind of a personal thing. Mr. Roosevelt felt that Wallace was the kind of a guy that he needed in southern California. But then when he had Wallace down there, he insisted on Barkley coming down, too. There was a great discussion and a great lot of debate went on between the national committee, and so forth, as to whether they wanted Barkley to go down there or not. However, he did go, and, as I say, he made a wonderful talk both at the Olympic Theater that night, and in Glendale. He made one of his best speeches at the Olympic Auditorium that night. By the way, it was quite odd. This was primarily set up for a prizefighting arena and all the speeches by the politicians was made from the ring. The place was packed to the ceiling. It was a well-organized and an enthusiastic meeting, but Mr. Barkley didn't get near the hand or the ovation that Mr. Wallace got. FUCHS: In what city was this meeting? MCENERY: This was held at the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. FUCHS: You went down to that? MCENERY: I was there, yes. I almost got killed that night between the bodyguards and the people wanting to see Wallace, primarily. They didn't seem to be interested in touching the coat of Mr. Barkley, who I thought was one of the most wonderful men we ever had in the Democratic Party. They all seemed to be interested in just getting to lay a hand on Wallace, and we kind of got caught up in the turmoil, the police and everything, taking us into this auditorium which was crowded to the rooftops, as I say; and there were people outside and we just got jammed up in the crowd. Anyhow, we got into the auditorium, and we got out all right, and I did drive Alben Barkley to the airport that night and he left. On the following day Mr. Wallace was going to northern California. This thing of Mr. Wallace going to San Francisco, we didn't even want him in San Francisco. When he told me he was going to go to San Francisco I told him, that I was sorry that we didn't have some arrangements made. He says to me, "Well, the national committee told me that you didn't want me in San Francisco." Well, I didn't even know that he knew. He had been nice to me for two days. I didn't even know that he knew that I didn't want him in northern California, but it was the opinion of everybody that he couldn't do us any good in northern California. However, he did come to northern California. Without mentioning the names of people in our office, there was a slight bit of confusion that resulted. All of the appointments for Mr. Wallace were made at one hotel and Mr. Wallace was over in another one of the leading hotels in San Francisco with another member of our office; and everybody came to the hotel and Mr. Wallace hadn't arrived. Three hours later Mr. Wallace left San Francisco and he hadn't seen anybody, including the newspaper people who were waiting around to see him and heard he was coming. Nobody saw him in San Francisco; he was gotten into San Francisco and out of San Francisco without anybody having an interview with him. We just didn't want it. We figured that he couldn't do anything but cause more turmoil in the party. As it turned out, in southern California it didn't cause any more turmoil than they had down there. You can't win anything in California unless you can get that southern California vote going in one direction. It was even worse in 1946 than it is now. FUCHS: Why did James Roosevelt urge so strongly the bringing of Wallace to California? MCENERY: I imagine it was a matter of old friendships and, maybe, underneath he may have thought the extra liberal group that backed Wallace and later on the third party group, that he could kind of bring them into the Democratic fold. But I didn't see any attempt to do this in southern California. It all seemed to be making a hero out of Wallace in California. I don't know what Roosevelt had in the back of his mind, but it would have been much better if in California, we had just forgot about Wallace during this particular period, there was so much discussion about him, and stayed with the regular Democrats and brought them in. Of course, a politician, a man in charge of the party, thinks about all of this a lot different than maybe some of the liberals or maybe some of those who maybe don't consider themselves politicians. They want to hear all sides of it. Whereas you, as a party organizer, want to keep your party together and you want to keep everybody working for the candidates and not getting all split off in the extracurricular debates that always happen among the Democrats. It doesn't seem to happen in the Republican Party near as much, although of late it has been, the last few years; but it didn't happen in the days of '46 and '47. I'd say that if I had to give the main reason for it, it was Roosevelt, even at this time, attempting to promote himself for a future office in California rather than the candidates. I felt that Pat Brown, and Rogers, and Shelley felt that way during the '46 campaign. That he was building himself up as a candidate for public office, rather than building them up to help them get the votes for the election that they were in. FUCHS: Do you know why he came to California? MCENERY: No. I don't. I heard rumors. I never did get it direct, but I heard that he had to come to California, that he had to leave Massachusetts. He came here primarily, as I understand it, to go into an insurance business with somebody else, where there was a potential of making some money. These are all things that I heard. He was in the insurance business in Southern California. It was Roosevelt and somebody else, I don't remember what the name was; but there was two of them in a company. I think that the fellow that he was in business with was also an easterner, from around Boston or someplace like that. We heard all these rumors; but I was so completely sold on the guy when he was elected chairman in the south, on account of his drawing power, that I thought if he just went along and worked like the dickens for the candidates, as we were doing in the north, he would have done a heck of a lot more good for himself politically for the future; and, of course, if he hadn't done what he did to Harry Truman in 1948 at the convention. FUCHS: How else did the Democratic National Committee assist in the California campaign in '46? Did they send anyone else from the Cabinet or other high ranking Democrats to help him? MCENERY: I'm not sure, but I think that year Secretary [Julius] Krug came out to one of our dinners. FUCHS: How did he fare? MCENERY: He wasn't much of a speaker. We had heard that he wasn't a good speaker before, and of course when we don't have good speakers we always use a lot of California wine to fill in. Instead of having two bottles of wine on the table we have three, on each table. A little later on in the evening I was master of ceremonies of that dinner and I had an awful time controlling the audience. Three times I stopped Secretary Krug and asked them to be quiet, and a little later on in the evening somebody yelled out, "Where's the last page of the speech?" And Krug for the fourth time asked me to intervene, and I said, "Where is the last page of the speech? I can't control them," I said, "I can't keep these guys quiet." Oh, there was one thing I did as a country boy. I changed all these dinners from the middle of the week to weekends, so we have it on a Friday or a Saturday night in San Francisco. And right away the audience went up from twelve to sixteen or seventeen hundred because the boys came in from down the San Joaquin Valley and up Sacramento Valley and clear up, as I said, to the Oregon border, and they came down to spend the week-end in San Francisco. These meetings are kind of long, anyhow, and I think the boys wanted to get out and see Chinatown or go to a show or something, and they thought Krug was taking up too much of their evening. I tried to tell him so, but he kept on grinding away on something that nobody was interested in, telling about the wonderful things Interior was doing. Mr. Krug that night left right after the banquet and went off in a huff. I went over to his room to apologize to him for the way the audience had acted and everything, and he thought I was as impertinent as they were. But the only thing that I was trying to do was to keep everybody from getting up and walking out. Secretary Krug was a nice man. He had a man by the name of [Carlton] Skinner with him as his executive assistant, who later on became Ambassador or representative of the United States to Guam, I believe it was; Governor of Guam. And he is now a resident of San Francisco, or he was just a short while ago, now in 1970. He was very close to Secretary Krug; he was in Washington with him, a very outstanding man, too, great ability. But Krug almost got mad at him because he thought that I handled the audience pretty well that night in getting the meeting over as well as I did. After all, we were primarily there to raise some money, both for the national committee and ourselves. We never had a lot of trouble with the national committee over the splitting of money until George Killion became treasurer, and he had so many contacts in California that he thought that all of the money should go directly to the national committee. We used to have a few tickets we would sell at a thousand dollars apiece for the dinner, but that didn't happen after Killion became national treasurer. He was able to know where that money came from and he had it sent directly through to the national committee, not to us. So, we had quite a time raising the funds that we did. I had a wonderful helper in Herb Erskine, who was my treasurer. Harley Hise, who later on became chairman of the RFC in Washington was the treasurer one year. Ed Heller and Bill Malone were co-chairmen one year for one of our dinners, and all of them were very successful, as I say, with the exception of the big contributions. They seemed to go… FUCHS: Just how would they divert that? MCENERY: They would get it direct to the national committee. They'd buy a ticket in Washington and they'd buy a ticket or two for the dinner here, and maybe they'd buy five or six tickets and maybe give us fifty dollars apiece, $250 for the dinner, where they used to give us two or three thousand for three tickets. We didn't sell any $1,000 tickets during the time that I was chairman of the party in northern California. FUCHS: You couldn't remonstrate to Killion? MCENERY: Oh, we did. The only time that we were successful in our pleading with Killion was to go ahead and have the dinner and decide how we were going to split the money afterwards. Mr. Killion always wanted to have the decision made before as to how it was going to be split, but after arguing a long time I'd have somebody like either Ed Heller or Bill Malone or Sheridan Downey or somebody to get ahold of him, and he'd capitulate; and we'd go ahead and have the dinner and then we'd give them two-fifths or one-third or whatever we had left on the dinner. We'd keep the rest of it, all of which was spent to keep our offices running. In northern California, which is a very pivotal state, when you hear about the money spent on national elections in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Illinois and New York we're running a fifteen cent store operation out here, we always were. Up till the time of the coming of TV. Everybody today -- even a man running for United States Senator or Secretary of State -- says that he needs eight or nine hundred thousand or a million dollars for his campaign for the primary. Well, Lord, in the 1946 campaign I don't think there was two hundred thousand spent on Rogers, Shelley, and Brown's campaign together in the final election. I know there wasn't. Brown ran his election on a shoestring, and I'm sure Rogers spent a lot of his own money, and that of a few of the friends that his father had had down south. He had been a Congressman for awhile and I guess made some friends in his own district there; but we were always selling pencils and shoelaces to try to raise enough money for the campaign. FUCHS: You mentioned three dinners in that one year, did that include the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner? MCENERY: That's what we called them all. We called them all the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. And I don't know how Jefferson and Jackson had so many birthdays, but we'd have one for Jefferson and one for Jackson and then we'd have one in between for just a prominent speaker, but we still called it a Democratic money raising dinner. Cross-filing, first of all, was our number one handicap for years, and thank God we haven't got that any more. The Democrats in Congress that we have are practically all of them from California with the exception of [Don] Edwards, and maybe [George E., Jr.] Brown, from down south, who by the way is running for United States Senator now; they're of the middle of the road character, practically all of our Congressmen. Of course, that doesn't please the extra liberal element in the Democratic Party. Sometimes I feel that they think the best thing to do is just to defeat this Democrat that's been in there for a number of years and elect a Republican, because the following year we'll be able to defeat the Republican and put in our own man. So they are willing to sacrifice any of these fine Democratic Congressmen we've got in California just to make sure that two or three years or four years hence they might be able to elect one of their own type in the Democratic Party. Consistently, in those places where we have Democrats for a number of years, and they decided to bolt this Democrat and a Republican was elected, we have great trouble in ever getting the Democrat back in again, even their type of a Democrat. FUCHS: California is an agricultural state and I was wondering if you brought anyone in that field to California in that election, other than Wallace of course? MCENERY: Oh, yes, we had Secretary [Charles FA Brannan. Brannan came, he wasn't a good speaker, but wherever the farmers came he was very well received. You know he talks in a very conversational tone and he wouldn't be the kind of a fellow that would get you to run out in the street and start campaigning for your candidates; but he gave us plenty of ammunition and he was particularly good at coming to the smaller meetings we held, particularly in universities and colleges around the country. I remember even after he was Secretary of Agriculture he came down a number of times from Colorado to San Francisco State and Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo, which is primarily an agricultural school. He came down to Santa Clara University, which is located in the middle of the Santa Clara Valley and is very much agricultural, and he made talks down there and was very well received, very cooperative everyplace. FUCHS: Do you have anecdotes about him? You came in personal touch with him and they might help delineate his character for historians? MCENERY: Not particularly. I know when he came to Santa Clara, Eisenhower had just been elected President of the United States and in introducing him I had a very fine introduction made out for Mr. Brannan. I happened to just think of something extemporaneously on the stage, and I said, "This is quite contrary to our President, who is now playing golf down in Georgia." The Republicans who were very much in the auditorium almost booed me off the stage, but Brannan got quite a kick out of it. He was wonderful about the way he'd answer questions, and he had the answers. I was quite surprised, you know, when everybody was complaining about the stockpiles that we had of food in the United States. He had a list of how long the supply of corn and wheat and flour and everything we had in the United States would last if we had very little or no production for a year or so. We'd practically be out of everything in three months. And everybody is talking about the tremendous stockpile we have. He thought it was wonderful for us to stockpile a lot of this stuff even though we weren't using it, just as insurance to protect ourselves from a day when we might have a blight or something and we wouldn't have the production we have now. Of course, we that live in California like to think that, as Brannan always used to say, that the war was won on food. And seeing that we used to be primarily a food producing state -- and we're still producing a great deal of food in the state, not as much as we used to in the fruit end, but more in the truck gardening end than we used to -- we still feel that California's primarily an agricultural state, although we have the electronic industries and everything else here at the present time. FUCHS: I came through the artichoke capital of the world on my way over here. MCENERY: Well, on your way back to San Francisco tomorrow or today, you'll go through what we call the lettuce bowl of the world, which is the Salinas Valley. You came down through Santa Cruz and over here to Monterey and you passed nothing but artichoke fields. And this afternoon when you back, if you go slow, you'll pass through nothing but lettuce fields, and -- well, I shouldn't say only lettuce fields you'll run into a lot of cauliflower and cabbage down there now. We were wonderful in this locality for strawberries, but strawberries will only grow for three years in any quantity in a particular place or a particular soil, and then that whole strawberry patch has got to be plowed up and you've got to put in something like alfalfa or something of that type to put the oxygen back in the ground again. The fourth year you try to raise strawberries in that patch you wouldn't get enough strawberries to pay for the harvest. So, you will, after you leave Salinas Valley, come into Santa Clara County and you'll still go through quite a few acres of orchards of prunes and apricots. Where the whole Santa Clara Valley back in the '20s, that is, Santa Clara County used to have a population of around a hundred thousand, it's now a million two or a million three hundred thousand; and San Jose when I was a boy used to have 20,000 population, it's now over 700,000 and it's gone primarily industrial. We have in the Santa Clara Valley the finest soil in the world and the only thing we're doing is building houses on it. There's only one place in the world that has deeper soil than Santa Clara County, that's the Nile Valley. Our loamy soil in Santa Clara Valley runs forty feet deep. Digging down for the foundation of a building or anything down there, you can go down forty feet and find nothing but fine soil. If it were topsoil anyplace else, a foot and a half deep would grow anything. But we have it just stacked up there and now we're just building houses on it. All right. We talked a great deal about '46 and now we come to 1947. Perhaps the greatest thing that happened to us -- in 1947 there was a young Congressman who was defeated, came from San Luis Obispo, and San Luis Obispo is primarily a railroad town. He was George Outland, who was in Congress, had stuck with Truman in ending the strike on the railroads. The railroad people got organized down there and they said that they couldn't stand this Outland anymore, so they defeated him in the election of 1946 and he moved to San Francisco and became a professor at San Francisco State College. He was a natural -- former Democratic Congressman and a very intelligent and fine speaker. He used to be in and out of the office, aid he worked with us on many things in the office. But in 1947 he, in conjunction with Jim Roosevelt, came up with the so-called "policy statement" for the Democratic Party of California. The actual mimeographing of the final copies was done in my office and it was mailed out with the northern California central committee envelopes, to every Democrat in California. We never saw it until some of the Democrats started getting it and showing it to us and showing the envelope. We called Outland in and he said it had been okayed by Roosevelt, had been corrected by him, and so forth, and that this was going to be an adopted policy by the executive committee and the state central committee. Well, the policy statement was a criticism of Truman's foreign policy. It was a criticism of everything Truman was trying to do and I believe we called it, what was it, "the containment of Communism," at the time? Well, anyhow this statement went out and we repudiated it in northern California, and Roosevelt said it was going to be the statement of the Democratic state central committee and we called a meeting. Roosevelt insisted on it being held in southern California and it was held at the City Hall in Los Angeles The only date that I can remember was it was held the morning of the night after Mrs. Truman, the mother of the President, had passed away. We had met the day before at the Biltmore Hotel, along with all of the other officers of the state central committee. Ollie Carter was there, and Mrs. Heller was there, George Luckey, Roosevelt, a number of others were present there, who we thought could lend some support. We tried to lay out a procedure or a program for the following day for the state central committee, and we did. We laid out an agenda, and we went to the meeting the following morning and Roosevelt met me at the stage there and he said, "Well, the first thing we've got to do before we get into this agenda is have a resolution passed of sympathy to send to the President over the death of his mother." Well, at 11 o'clock at night or 11:30 that evening, after holding a meeting from 10 o'clock in the morning, we never did settle the most important thing on the agenda, which we felt was the endorsing of the President's foreign policy. They wanted to pass the so-called policy statement that was written by Roosevelt and George Outland. Well, the meeting adjourned about 11:30 or 12 o'clock at night on a motion by me to adjourn the meeting. We couldn't get anyplace, it was just ending up in a debating society meeting. Of course, the press were there and recording all of the differences of opinion between the Democrats, which gave them enough to print the newspapers for the next three months, showing of the problems the Democrats were having. This was the beginning of the real problem between -- well, most people will say it was a problem between Jim Roosevelt and myself, but it wasn't. It was a difference of opinion as to whether we should go along with the national policy as given by our President in helping him out every way we could; or whether we should try to have a foreign policy of our own promulgated by the state central committee of California. FUCHS: I'm interested in why Roosevelt would come out against the policy which, primarily, Truman had just enunciated that became known as the Truman Doctrine, aid to Greece and Turkey? And a little later on we had the beginning of the Marshall plan in Marshall's speech at Harvard. Was this strong feeling against the way the country was spending money? MCENERY: I told you before that I can't tell whether it was a matter of Jim Roosevelt already trying to promote himself for public office in California or whether it was his attempt to placate the great number of liberals that were in southern California who, after we finished the war, thought that we should do a lot more for our former ally Russia, than we were doing. I am beginning, as years roll by, to think that it was more a matter of Roosevelt promoting himself. He was naturally anxious to get the backing of that liberal element in southern California. It practically didn't exist in the north and they tried several times to get it going in northern California. The closest they ever came was when they got a Senator George Miller in, who was from Alameda County, to start supporting that kind of a program, and he did pretty good in it for a short while in Contra Costa County. George Miller later on ran for Lieutenant Governor, maybe on the same ticket that Roosevelt did in 1950 (I don't know whether it was '50 or not, but it was around that time). But Senator George Miller became disillusioned with Roosevelt later on and didn't have near so much to do with him after the election of 1950, after he ran for Lieutenant Governor. I can't really tell you, I only have my own opinion, and I'm inclined to think it was more an attempt on the part of Roosevelt to get this liberal element to back him up for whatever statewide office that he was going to seek later on. I don't really think that he intended in the beginning to run for Governor of California; I think that he originally had his mind set on running for United States Senator. But the field seemed to be overcrowded there with other candidates wanting to run, and he drifted into the idea of running for Governor as time went along. He finally did become the candidate in '50. FUCHS: Would you comment on this excerpt from a memo which Will Rogers, Jr. wrote sometime in early '47, it's undated? MCENERY: By the way, Will Rogers was practically always with the people from northern California in supporting Harry Truman and his policy. Go ahead, you read what you've got there. FUCHS: Well, the gist of this long memo, two and a half pages, is that he was opposing the statement of policy, and also the fact that the state chairman had called a meeting to discuss anything in the field of foreign affairs. He pointed out that the '46 platform of the Democratic Party of California was exhaustive and complete, and contained an anti-Communist preamble, which the statement of policy did not. He said, "This 'Statement of Policy' as submitted by George Outland, endorsed by James Roosevelt, and sent to the State Committmen [sic], says, in its section on Foreign Affairs: 'Neither American arms nor American money for arms should be loaned or given to any country unless the proper United Nations authority has certified that such loans or arms are necessary to resist outside aggression. We specifically include Greece and Turkey."' Then he says further: That sort of statement should not appear even in a draft of a Democratic policy proposal." Now this is bringing the United Nations in. I wonder…. MCENERY: George Outland and Roosevelt together prepared the statement, it wasn't all George Outland's statement. This statement, as I found out later on, was bantered back and forth for a couple of months between Roosevelt and Outland, and Outland made trips to southern California with whoever Roosevelt was getting to help him write that statement. There's no doubt at all that that is only a part of the statement. It wasn't a statement of the Democratic state central committee and it was never endorsed by the state central committee. The only motions that came out of any of our meetings was an endorsement of Truman's foreign policy. And that came out in various times. As I say, I don't believe it came out from that meeting in Los Angeles called by Roosevelt -- we had an awful time getting the middle-of-the-road or the conservative Democrats to go down there. They all had to go down at their own expense. This was two or three hundred people that had to go down there. Not only that, but Roosevelt had the room packed with the noisiest element you could get ahold of, as proved by the fact that at the closing of the meeting Judge O'Day got hit on the head with a chair, Judge O'Day from San Francisco because he thought they needed a second to the motion to adjourn the meeting and he jumped up to second the motion, and somebody hit him on the head. This was just a complete rabble-rousing meeting and it got worse as the day dragged on, and they found out they couldn't do anything. There was an assemblyman by the name of Lewis that was quite a rabble-rouser. He was defeated later on, came from Buttonwillow, a little town down by Bakersfield. He was one of the most rabid speakers there was in that meeting of 1947. I don't know how I remembered that name, just out of nowhere. We had helped elect him to the Assembly. Buttonwillow is a little town that sprang up out of old cardboard cartons and so forth, down there on the side of the hills outside of Bakersfield during the depression with the, we used to call them the pakies that came in here. But they had to land someplace and I guess nobody owned this land called Buttonwillow and they just went and moved in down there and built themselves whatever they could in homes. And this Lewis was a product of this locality and we thought he was a pretty good boy, and we sent him some money from the state central committee in '46, in the final election, and we helped him get elected. But you will see his name mentioned quite prominently in, for instance, the problem in regard to the boycotting of the grapes in California at the present time. I've seen his name mentioned there. Rogers was completely loyal to the President all the way through. He was a great fighter and he knew how to expand on his thoughts and he was a wonderful influence at all of these meetings as well as -- at the convention in 1948 he was quite a stalwart. He helped swing many people who were on the fence in southern California because of Roosevelt's antics, and who, even in the caucus in 1948, didn't vote for Truman. But when we came on the floor and the vote was taken, the California delegation voted for Truman and there was no doubt about it. FUCHS: What part did you play in this meeting in '47? MCENERY: In '47 I was nothing more than a vice-chairman. The main thing we did was to convince every state central committeeman that he should attend the meeting, and if he didn't attend the meeting he should see that his proxy was given to somebody. We had to vote the proxies because we knew, the meeting being held in southern California, that anybody that was wavering at all would go along with Roosevelt down there, and that's exactly what happened. At first, this morning at the state central committee, I was really afraid if we had a vote what might happen. But as the meeting went on a little bit we found out who these various people were. We found out that most of them that were making the noise -- Roosevelt was letting everybody talk including those who weren't officers and members of the state central committee -- letting everybody speak at this state central committee meeting. We had a great argument in the middle of the afternoon about this, that this was a meeting of the state central committee and we finally moved the members of the state central committee up to the front, and made the other people move to the back. But still, as the day dragged on and the evening dragged on after dinner, we still had most of the noise from the back of the hall. They were just going to disrupt the meeting if they could. In fact, it was the audience that kept us from actually having the right kind of a motion passed. Roosevelt, presiding over the meeting, just added to the commotion and to the disturbance that was going on by recognizing certain people that should not have been recognized. Anyhow, I think that we did real well in keeping everybody in the north . We lost three or four who were friends of Outland and friends of Roosevelt. We lost a few of those. I guess we lost about three or four of them from the north, but outside of that the north stayed solid behind Truman. Every time we had a meeting we endorsed the Truman doctrine, which later on turned out to be the saving of Greece and Turkey from communism. It was wonderful that Truman was able to do what he did do there at the time and everybody recognizes it now, of course; but it was kind of hard to recognize what was happening there at the time. FUCHS: Nothing really came out of this meeting then? MCENERY: The statement of policy was dropped. It was never endorsed, it never came up for a motion to be endorsed; it was bombed from every side, by every right thinking Democrat that was there. There was only one thing to do, as Will Rogers said there -- the policy statement was made by, not the executive committee of the state central committee, but by the state central committee itself. And that remained the policy of the state central committee until we held another meeting. There was never any intention that the executive committee of the state central committee could change the platform on which we ran in the election, and which we, with changes of course in '48, some bringing it up to date, would run on again. It was practically the same statement. But not only did the policy statement die, but nobody ever heard about George Outland again; he's still a teacher at San Francisco State, or was the last I heard, and we never heard anything about him. FUCHS: What tack did Roosevelt take from then on, from late '47 up to the election? MCENERY: He then started off on this campaign that he had to elect himself national committeeman from California. He started in concentrating on that, and he first of all lined up the backing of southern California. He never should have got the backing from northern California; but there was a deal made along the line, as we say, when McGrath came out here and so forth. Again, the people who came out here wouldn't believe what I said about Jim Roosevelt anymore than I would believe what was said about Jim Roosevelt when I was elected chairman of the north in 1946. The fellow had a wonderful, selling way about him and he gave you the impression that he could do a job and he was all for the Democratic Party. But as it turned out, he wasn't for the Democratic Party, he was just for Jim Roosevelt. Now he started off then, I guess, after 1947, lining up some support for himself and started out then, of course, talking about delegates for the convention. Then, of course, we went into the episode where we had to have McGrath -- we first of all had Gael Sullivan, his executive assistant from the national committee, out here, and he couldn't do anything; and we had others come out. FUCHS: When was this? MCENERY: This was in the latter part of '47 and early '48. It kept going right up to the time that we held our meeting in San Luis Obispo where a number agreed, and I capitulated on it. As far as I was concerned if these people wanted Roosevelt for a national committeeman it was all right with me. He seemed to have the votes in southern California, whether or not we actually knew he had the votes. When McGrath came out here and he laid out the policy as to how we should pick the delegates to the convention, they had no objection to Roosevelt being national committeeman and many other people in the north that hadn't come too closely in contact with him didn't have any objection. So when it came to a matter of picking the delegation and this is unheard of, electing a national committeeman before you go to the convention. The national committeeman was ordinarily elected by the delegates to a convention, at the convention site. This was the first time it was ever done this way in California that I know of. FUCHS: Now the state convention is every two years… MCENERY: Two years. FUCHS: …in even years. MCENERY: Yes, but that's not when the national committeeman is elected. The national committeeman is elected by the delegates to the national convention. FUCHS: Oh, at the national convention. MCENERY: At the national convention he's always elected, not at the state convention. And we objected to this at the time and we actually should not have elected Roosevelt at San Luis Obispo, but we did it. FUCHS: Now what year was that? MCENERY: This is early, this is right in the beginning of '48 after the delegates were picked, and we went down to San Luis Obispo and held this meeting. FUCHS: That was just a meeting, it was not the state convention? MCENERY: No. This was a matter of just the delegates meeting, at San Luis Obispo. It was the state central committee; but we laid down the policy there as to how the delegates should be picked for the national convention. And this policy was agreeable with Howard McGrath, the procedure where we were bringing the congressmen in and we'd elect them from the congressional districts and so many from each district; and at large, they would be picked by the state officers and so forth. Can you give me any help on that, are…. FUCHS: Well, I have a letters here from James Roosevelt in which he points out to the Presi-dent that a meeting of the full California Democratic state committee (600 members), has been called for July 26 and 27 in Los Angeles. [Letter, James Roosevelt to President Truman, June 25, 1947, See appendix.] MCENERY: What date was that? FUCHS: This letter is dated June 25, 1947, and he says that at that meeting I think the air will be considerably cleared as to just exactly what the situation is within the Democratic Party here in California. And then he suggested that the President "invite Mr. Edwin Pauley, Mrs. Edward Heller and myself to meet with you as soon after [this meeting] as is convenient….I think it of extreme importance." MCENERY: Well, that's the policy meeting, is it not? We never held a meeting there, we held it at San Luis Obispo. FUCHS: Well, I don't know, I was wondering how Pauley came into the picture in opposing Roosevelt as to the method of selecting delegates? MCENERY: Well, he lost his power. He lost his power there. Pauley didn't stay too active in the picture; and Roosevelt knew that Pauley wasn't with him, Pauley never was with him. I heard Roosevelt talk about Pauley many times when we were alone, and he didn't have much respect for him and I think it was mutual. Roosevelt said he wanted Pauley, Mrs. Heller and himself, and who else? FUCHS: Just the three of them to meet with President Truman. MCENERY: That was constantly the way he did things. And that letter was June or July '47? FUCHS: There was an earlier hassle at the Jackson Day Dinner at the Biltmore in Los Angeles, which is, I believe, some of the background for this. Do you recall that? MCENERY: Where was the dinner held? FUCHS: At the Biltmore in Los Angeles. MCENERY: Dick Nacy was there. It was a lunch meeting wasn't it? FUCHS: Well, this was a dinner at which, if I remember correctly, they were supposed to have insulted Mrs. Roosevelt. [Here McEnery read the letter by James Roosevelt of June 25, 1947. Letter is appended.] MCENERY: This meeting here was never held in Los Angeles. FUCHS: It wasn't? MCENERY: No, unless this is the policy meeting, it was held, I think -- unless you can find out the date that President Truman's mother died. If it happened to be around July 25th,* then this was the policy meeting that was held. Of course he, the President, and the national committee were thoroughly familiar with this * President Truman's mother died July 26, 1947. policy statement because it caused an insurrection. "To secure that unity is, of course, the main hurdle which we have to overcome and I believe that the only feasible way of doing this is to lay the cards on the table, quite frankly, secure certain decisions and go ahead with an agreed upon program. ** Well, Mr. Gael Sullivan and Mr. McGrath came out here and had a laid out program with the guy and it was never kept, and nobody else ever got him to keep anything. FUCHS: "Jefty" O'Connor wrote… MCENERY: Oh, Jefty O'Connor, he became a great pal of Pat Brown's later on. What year was that, Jefty O'Connor... FUCHS: That was July 9, 1947. MCENERY: Oh, Jefty's boy, excuse me, not Jefty himself. This is Jefty when he was, what **Read from letter, James Roosevelt to President Truman, June 25, 1947. See appendix. was he, president of the Infantile Paralysis and he retired… FUCHS: No, you're thinking of Basil O'Connor. This is Jefty O'Connor who was U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of California. MCENERY: Excuse me. Is this the son of that O'Connor? FUCHS: Well, I don't know about the son, this was Jefty O'Connor who was the judge, writing from Los Angeles on July 9, '47; and he wrote Matt and said, "I was happy to learn that the Chief [which is the President], will discuss these differences with James Roosevelt and Edwin Pauley." I just wondered if you knew about this? MCENERY: There never was a meeting held. Ed Pauley and Mrs. Heller wouldn't go a meeting back there with him. FUCHS: Now this letter didn't mention Mrs. Heller, but do you know if he might have…. MCENERY: This one here did.* FUCHS: Yes, that one did. Do you know if this meeting might have been held with Pauley and Roosevelt? MCENERY: I don't think that Pauley ever attended a meeting with Jim Roosevelt. If they did it was unbeknownst to me. I didn't know a think about it and Pauley used to phone me up all the time about what was going on, let me know what Roosevelt was pulling, and what he thought about it. We acted our own way here. We always used to say to him, "Well, damn it, that's your problem down in southern California; you've got lots of friends up here, but we can't help you out if you can't get along with that guy, and we know * James Roosevelt to President Truman, June 25, 1947. See appendix. you can't." I couldn't keep anything straight for a week at a time, let alone for three or four months. I think that Howard McGrath and Gael Sullivan thought we were too strong against Jim Roosevelt and his cohorts of southern California until they got a taste of it. I'd like to see some of Howard McGrath's memorandums on the thing as to what happened, because he figured he just wasted his time coming out here. He thought that he had everything fixed up when he went back and it just wasn't fixed. We did say something didn't we -- started to anyhow -- about Howard McGrath going down there, and how we fixed up a formula for picking the delegates to the national convention ? FUCHS: What was that? MCENERY: This was a formula where they agreed that they should be picked by congressional districts and that there should be nominees from the district, and we should pick the delegates provided that no one was on the delegation that was particularly obnoxious to the Congressman in the district. The Congressman could have a veto over whether a certain party was going to serve on the delegation. Then we had the problem of picking half the delegates women and half of them men, and there weren't that many women active in Democratic politics in the north, although they seemed to have gotten sufficient prominent women in southern California. I remember they had a Mrs. Sayre, I believe that was her name. She was a very fine woman and very prominent and worked in Democratic politics for many years down there. She was loyal to Truman and they put a lot of pressure on her in southern California to have her go along with those who were undecided. That was what they first had, they were undecided about Truman. They'd never say that there was anything wrong with Truman, with the exception of that policy statement. The only thing that they'd say was that Truman couldn't get elected. That was the old story. Well, you don't give up on your friends just because they can't get elected, you owe some loyalty to them. Even if the man could not get elected, if he was following the policy of the Democratic Party, you should stay with him. Later on my problems with Roosevelt, or I'd say the northern California problems with Roosevelt, was that we knew that no matter what the policy or platform was of the Democratic Party, he wouldn't follow it, he'd make up his own. And you never knew what it was from one day to another. You couldn't proceed on the assumption that it was going to remain this way, because he said so. He'd talk to somebody else and he'd change his mind about it. It never occurred to me that you ought to be for Truman, or against him, just because you felt he couldn't be elected. You just go up and do the best you can. It was true in the Culbert Olson campaign in 1942. I felt that he was the Governor of California, he'd followed the Democratic platform, he did what the Democratic Party wanted, and you owed your loyalty to him to support him. Of course, this isn't the way it's always done in politics. They say you've got to be practical. I don't feel that way about it. I think that loyalty should come first. I don't think that you could find a statement made by Gael Sullivan or Harold McGrath; or anybody that ever came out to California from the national committee, that wouldn't say that we were trying to do everything we could do to promote the Democratic ticket. We had loyal Congressmen, loyal to the party, and loyal to the President, and they were reelected. In southern California where they had Congressmen that were always going off on their own thoughts on this stuff and trying to promote new policies before we held conventions and so forth on their own, they were very shortly defeated. Clair Engle was a great example of a man who stayed with what he thought was right and he became United States Senator, and had he lived would have been a great United States Senator. He was a fighter, but the poor fellow, came down with that brain trouble; and it threw California into quite a turmoil because Clair Engle was a quite healthy man when this thing came on and it just hit him all at once. They figured every day that this operation or that one would have made him the old Clair Engle that he was. It was the statement of the Democrats that caused the constant delay. I think if that was handled right, from the beginning -- but it was handled from California with Pat Brown worrying about whether Clair Engle was going to run or not; and him trying to urge a statement on the thing, and the constant contradictory statements made to the press, that caused great troubles in Democratic politics here in California, and which later on caused us to lose the United States Senatorship. Can you imagine a state like California, with at least 3 to 2 registration Democratic (it used to be 2 to 1 Democratic), selecting two Republican United States Senators? I don't think it's ever happened in the history of the country before where a state that had a predominately one party registration elected the other party's men to the Senate. You had the case of Kennedy, John Kennedy's press secretary coming out here at the last minute and filing for the United States Senate -- he was pulled out and Salinger came in. Salinger won the Democratic nomination fairly easy, but he was defeated by Murphy because everybody had connected Salinger with the East, although he was a prominent Californian and a member of the press and a good reporter, and worked in San Francisco for years. We all knew him in San Francisco, and Pierre would have made a good United States Senator, yet he was defeated, and why? Why didn't the Democrats vote for him? Murphy was no outstanding man to become United States Senator, and I think that the Democrats will very probably replace him this time by the Democratic nominee, whoever he is. It's now between [John V.] Tunney and Brown, and whoever else is running, whoever gets that nomination. I don't think that either Tunney or Brown are strong candidates. Neither one of them are known at all in northern California. Tunney comes from Riverside County which is away down in the extreme end of the state. He spends all his time down around Palm Springs. I don't think he's a strong candidate, but I don't know Brown at all. He may be a very fine candidate, too; but I'm always suspicious of anybody that gets the endorsement of this extra liberal club that we've got in the Democratic setup here in California. It was originally formed as a club to put United States Senator [Alan] Cranston over. Yet they turned on him when he was running for United States Senator. He's the guy that started the club. FUCHS: What's the name of that? MCENERY: That's the -- oh, the C.D.C., Californians Democratic… I don’t know what, I keep forgetting the name of it now but they've gone to practically nothing, but the Republican press gives them a lot of space every time they hold a meeting. They just got through defeating Tunney, I think, 600 to 50 or something like that at their convention. He went down there to get the endorsement of this organization and they turned him down. Anyhow, we're getting into United States politics and not as much on the information that you want. FUCHS: When did Roosevelt first come out for Eisenhower? MCENERY: He came out, practically, against Truman right after we had elected him national committeeman at San Luis Obispo; and he wasn't for Eisenhower then, but I think the attempted Eisenhower boom came along about two months before we went to the convention. We were on the train going to Philadelphia in '48 when Eisenhower made his famous statement that military men should not seek the Presidency. His training was wrong for that kind of position, and that the civilian should at all times hold that type of position, and a military man should not be the leader of the Government, and should not run for President. And eight years later he runs and gets elected, which -- lucky the country was in good shape after all the years of a Democratic Party, and lucky the Democrats came along afterwards to put it back in shape again. FUCHS: Well, you don't think he did that just to prove his point, do you? MCENERY: Hardly, I think he tried hard, but he's like many, another guy. He gets to a position where he doesn't particularly know anything about the job and relies on somebody else, and the somebody else that he relied on proved to be not worthy of the trust. That's all that we can say about it. FUCHS: When did Roosevelt come back into the fold? MCENERY: Going across the country, I imagine we were the laughing stock of the nation; Californians going across on this special train. We were hooked together with the southern delegation at Ogden, and we practically had set up a twenty-four hour a day watch to see that nobody from southern California came into the northern California, train. At least we'd hear the rumors as the train stopped to take on a little water or make one of its regular stops going across the country. After Eisenhower said he wasn't a candidate, and made it very definite, the next thing we heard was that the southern California delegation was going for Douglas. When we got off the train at Philadelphia, Douglas had pulled out and said he wouldn't be considered a candidate and wouldn't be nominated -- and then when we arrived at Philadelphia there was a big banner that the southern California group was carrying, and it had [Claude] Pepper for President and Jim Roosevelt for Vice President. Well, that never got outside of the depot where the picture was taken. I got pretty disgusted both with Mrs. Heller and Jack Shelley at the time, because they, after riding across the country and not talking to Mr. Roosevelt, they stood under this banner in Philadelphia and had their picture taken. I told them that the banner should be removed; and this was in all the papers in the country right after we arrived, in fact, that was the picture of the California delegation, with Pepper for President. FUCHS: Were they serious? MCENERY: Well, I imagine they were serious about anything but Truman. But we took care of that the next day in our caucus when Jack Shelley recognized me and I called Jim Roosevelt everything that I felt he was. I gave a history and told how much I thought that he was needed in the Democratic Party and so forth in California, and what a wonderful thing he was in helping us gather audiences and talking to Democrats. Then I went through the whole history of disappointments that we had with him. And I ended up by making the motion that we ask for his resignation as national committeeman. I was supported in that by such people as Pat McDonough and Will Rogers. Chauncey Tramutolo, who was the United States Attorney in San Francisco, and 12 or 14 others. After my motion was made, and it was seconded by Will Rogers, somebody made a motion, after a great deal of discussion and a few very frail attempts to defend what I had said about Mr. Roosevelt, and of course, reprimanding me for the terrible things that I had said about him that shouldn't have been said. And I said, "Well, I first of all made the motion that we have a closed meeting here. I told you this was going to be a family fight and we shouldn't have anybody in, but you people voted to have the press in here hoping, of course, that would stop what we were going to do. But we can't stop what we figure we've got to do here. We were elected by the people of California and we said that we were pledged to Truman and we're going to cast the ballot that way." Later on, the following day, after the motion was made to lay on the table and that carried, we had a meeting, or maybe it was the second day after that, and there was a lot of politicking going around, and some of Roosevelt's friends said that Roosevelt had to be vindicated, that we had to give him a vote of confidence. And he was told in no uncertain terms by many delegates, both north and south, that if the motion came off the table and they had to vote on it, they had to vote to ask him to resign. As a result of that no motion ever came to take it off the table and we went on to the convention and the California delegation voted for Truman. I don't think that there were any people at that convention that Mr. Truman thought any more of than he did of the delegates that came from northern California. In fact, when he came to the convention that evening, when he gave his acceptance speech, which was held up until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, while we debated about a minority-majority plank on this minority question of civil rights I think that the California delegation spent two or three hours then visiting with Mr. Truman in the back room of the convention hall; and there didn't seem to be anybody that he was more pleased to meet than the Malones and the Hellers and the Chows, and the McDonoughs, and all of these other people who went into the back room to meet him. I guess half of the delegates from northern California went in to see him. FUCHS: Do you recall any of the conversation that occurred? MCENERY: No. I do recall one particular piece of conversation that I might put on the record. When we arrived in Philadelphia I got ahold of Howard McGrath, and I told Howard McGrath what I was going to do. I asked him what they wanted us to do, and I told him what I had planned on doing, and Howard McGrath told me afterwards it was up to us, we were to handle our own affairs. They'd like to have the California delegation, though, issue some kind of a statement to the effect that there was nothing to all this newspaper talk in regard to bolting Truman and the Democratic slate and considering all these other people. We arrived in the morning and this meeting was held in the afternoon. The Oakland Tribune scooped the story on all the California papers, because in their afternoon edition (it's one of those clippings I gave you there) a man by the name of Thomas printed the story of what we were going to do. And it happened just the way that we told Thomas that we were going to do it. I get back to this story of Howard McGrath. I told him what we were going to do and he consulted with the White House, I guess, on it and I was told by McGrath that the President said he didn't care what we did with Roosevelt, but if I was going to do anything rash like murder the guy or something like that, be sure I did it in the Post Office so he could pardon me. I'd be tried in the Federal court. We didn't have to murder him, but we murdered him with words I'll tell you, and the fact that Will Rogers was so strong in that meeting really shook more people than my speech against the fellow. Although I didn't miss any points in what had happened, about the beginning of my feeling about Roosevelt being a great guy and in what he could help us do, and then my trouble with him over the policy statement, and then the various other deals that we made along the line, nothing of which was ever kept. Well, I think that all's well that comes out all right. I think that President Truman, and I have always thought, will go down in history as one of the greatest Presidents we ever had. When the whole thing is analyzed, and we see what a mess the world is in today, it was much better to do it the way he did, all the way from the Berlin airlift to the stand we made in Korea. When people read the history books and they know everything that was behind all these things. Even the MacArthur story, which caused such commotion; he was as right as any President ever was when he let MacArthur go. Maybe my feelings didn't predominate at the time, but as we read history, it seems like that's the only thing the President of the United States could do as long as he is the Commander in Chief of the Army. He has a right to have people take orders, and when they don't take it you've got to get somebody to take their place. Every year that goes by I have more people say to me "Boy, you sure were right on Truman, he was a great fellow." And I don't think half of them voted for him when he ran for President, but as they read the history books you have more Republicans say it to you than Democrats. FUCHS: Did California vote as a unit? MCENERY: We voted as a unit. California voted for Truman. FUCHS: There was no one, as you recall, that was adamant against Truman? MCENERY: Oh, there were a lot of them there that voiced their opinion privately, in fact, I told you I was very disturbed about the statement that was printed in the paper that Jack Shelley made, where he said that we're going to vote for Truman, but we're not doing it enthusiastically. Well, that may have been Jack Shelley's spontaneous thought at the time, whatever he was upset about at the moment, but Jack Shelley had been consistently for Truman. He never wavered at any time. In fact, Mr. Shelley was chairman of a couple of small dinners we held in San Francisco, which were non-political, but at the same time there were nothing but Democratic politicians there. I remember that Jack Shelley's wife was very seriously ill, later on died. A magnificent big bouquet of red roses, three or four dozen, was presented to the President (and I think his daughter Margaret was there), and the President took the bouquet of roses and gave them to Jack Shelley and wrote a card and said, "Take these to Mrs. Shelley and tell her they came from the President." I think that, maybe -- I'm sorry it came out in the press -- but I think that maybe Jack Shelley was doing a little probing to find out what some of these other guys were thinking and what they were going to do. FUCHS: I found in my notes on this southern California Democratic meeting in June of '47, at which it was said Pauley forced the withdrawal of Gael Sullivan and muzzled Secretary of Treasury John Snyder, and Mrs. Roosevelt was insulted by the fact that she had to carry the whole burden of the speechmaking at this meeting, that at this time they were urging the ouster of Pauley as national committeeman. MCENERY: Oh, they were urging it all the time. Jim Roosevelt felt that he couldn't beat Pauley for national committeeman unless he sabotaged him and he was just consistently doing it, both in his private conversations and public, when he had his friends around, "that we had to get rid of Pauley, and we couldn't have people like Pauley, they didn't represent the Democratic Party," and things like this. He was successful in southern California in neutralizing Pauley, there's no doubt about it, because he was constantly in there. Mr. Pauley only worked on politics as a side issue. He was a business guy and Mr. Roosevelt practically spent his entire time working on politics, and collecting money, and signing notes as chairman of the state Democratic central committee, and borrowing money. We made a financial statement consistently to the state central committee, and in the minutes of those days you'll see where we gave a financial statement of what we took in and what we spent. I don't think any place in the record you'll ever find a financial statement of the Democratic central committee of southern California, and after all, the money we spent was supposed to be incorporated with his financial statement. I remember asking Roosevelt one time, "What are we going to do about repaying all these notes, and all this money that you're borrowing, not to promote candidates, but to promote only the people you want, and to eventually get more of a control over the state central committee?" He was helping out assemblymen and senators and anybody that was a "Roosevelt lover," as we said. And those that didn't love Roosevelt and didn't go along, such as people like Vin [Vincent] Thomas of San Pedro, who was a great assemblyman, and who should have for years been chairman of the Democratic group in the assembly, and who by the way, was defeated by [Jesse M.] Unruh for speaker, when Unruh first became speaker in the assembly. Well, Vin Thomas never got any help from anybody in southern California, he had to go out and get his own support. Vin Thomas is now, I guess serving thirty years in the legislature; a real leader, he comes from San Pedro. In fact, they've just built a big new overpass out of San Pedro that goes over the harbor there, and they call it the Vin Thomas Viaduct, great big bridge that goes over the town. He's well-loved down there. And those are the kind of people that we liked in northern California. When they've got a guy like Clair Engle, or Jack Shelley, or Frank Havenner, or George Miller or any of these Congressmen that we had, there was never any real trouble in reelecting these people. They followed the Democratic platform and the Democratic policy statements, and they represented their district, and they represented California. It seems like too many of these people just get elected to one office and they're campaigning for another one right away. Clair Engle was a good Congressman from the cow counties, as he used to call it, and that's all he ever wanted to be. He never wanted to be United States Senator until the people of California discovered what a great guy he was. He was a great speaker, he was a regular keg of dynamite. He didn't wear himself out, he just got a sickness that took him away from us; but Clair Engle could have been anything, he could have been something in the national picture had he lived. And loyalty could have been his middle name. He was a great Democrat and he was very highly thought of by Senator Downey, Sheridan Downey. Between Sheridan Downey and himself, they are responsible for the tremendous allotments that California received from the Federal Government through the years. They were great in working on the Colorado River water project. Clair Engle was chairman of the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee of Congress. He'd been in for a number of years, and besides the dynamic leadership that he showed on the Committee, he became the chairman, did great things for California. Well, those are the kind of people that we like in northern California, and I always figured that loyalty was one of the greatest things that you could show in politics or anything else. We are sorry that we didn't find the same feeling in southern California among a few of them. FUCHS: At the same time, in this meeting I referred to, a Judge Stanley Moffett who was vice-chairman of the state central committee,* came out praising Wallace for bucking the Truman Doctrine, do you have any reflections on that? MCENERY: That is a Stanley Mosk, Judge? FUCHS: Well, now the paper or the clipping that I saw said it was a Judge Stanley Moffett, vice-chairman of the state central committee, now maybe that was in error because the newspapers make all kinds of mistakes. MCENERY: Well, that would be Judge Stanley Mosk. FUCHS: Was he the vice-chairman in ‘47, June ‘47? *Moffett was vice-chairman of the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee, not the Democratic State Central Committee. MCENERY: No, he wasn't. He wasn’t a vice-chairman. Is that a newspaper clipping? FUCHS: I took it from a clipping. A Judge Stanley Moffett. MCENERY: No, it's Mosk, Stanley Mosk, he later on became Attorney General. If you attended one of those meetings down there in southern California you’d be dumbfounded at the things they'd cheer and the things that they would hoot at down there. There are so many Democrats like myself that were considered to be extra liberal back in those days of ‘40 to ‘48,, we were considered to be too liberal, and today when they talk about you, you're the ultra-conservatives in the party. I don't know what happened whether the party left us, or we left the party, but I don't figure that we’ve changed any. I think that I’d like to know where Mosk was supposed to have made that statement? FUCHS: Well, this was supposed to have been made at the time of that meeting in June ‘47 where Sullivan was to have spoken, and Snyder, and neither of them did. The same clipping said that this Judge Stanley Moffett had praised Wallace for bucking the Truman Doctrine. MCENERY: I don't think Stanley Mosk was too much of anything in the Democratic Party at that time. He came along later. Stanley Mosk was a young guy who became secretary to Culbert Olson when he was elected Governor of California in ‘38, and I don't think that there was any-body did more to destroy Olson than Stanley Mosk did when he was his secretary. He thought he was running the whole office. FUCHS: You don't recall Stanley Moffett in late 1947? MCENERY: No, there was no Stanley Moffett that I know of. There could have been a Moffett in southern California, but I never heard of him. And he surely wasn't a vice-chairman of the Democratic Party. He could have been a member of the state central committee, but I never heard of him. And the word Stanley is not a very common first name. FUCHS: Henry Wallace announced his candidacy for the Presidency late in December, 1947; that was on the third party ticket of course. What effect did that have here? MCENERY: Not near as much effect as it had on the Democrats when he was dismissed from the Cabinet. There may have been a little smoke left in December, but I don't remember how many votes he took in California. Have you got a total of that? FUCHS: I don't have it here, it wasn't a great many. MCENERY: I'm sorry I'm not where I had those books available, we could talk a lot about figures and about various counties where we had the real Democratic leadership. In Alameda County, for instance, where we had Monroe Friedman,, and Pat McDonough. John Perchio wasn't in the picture then. Also Deeden who is now a superior court judge, by the way, in Alameda County. When we had that kind of leadership in Alameda County it told in the election returns. If it hadn't been for the vote we got in Alameda County and San Joaquin Valley, and in Sacramento as a result of the support we had from the Sacramento -- and Fresno -- Bee oh, I wanted to say something about the Sacramento Bee. The Sacramento Bee, as I told you, is published in Sacramento and Fresno. It's published and has the biggest circulation all through the San Joaquin Valley. Truman when he came to California early in 148, and made this so-called non-political trip, was met at Klamath Falls by Ollie Carter (now Federal judge in northern California) and a few other Democrats. They were able to convince the President and the people that were traveling with him that the speech on public ownership of utilities had to be made at Sacramento right after he came to the capital of California. Well, there was a great deal of argument, but Ollie Carter and some of the people, I'd say primarily Ollie, were able to convince them that that speech had to be a strong, hard-hitting speech. There were several corrections made in it, and right after Truman made the speech the Sacramento Bee, which was kind of standing on the sidelines, came out with a full editorial endorsement of Harry Truman. I think that that had more to do, Alameda County and that endorsement of the Sacramento Bee in the great San Joaquin County had practically all to do with the carrying of California for Truman. FUCHS: What else do you recall of that trip that was billed as non-political in June 1948? MCENERY: We had that meeting at the City Hall of which George Riley was chairman, and I gave you that picture of the President walking in and the speech that he gave was mostly on the United Nations. We were successful in getting the President to talk a little about labor, because San Francisco is a great labor center. However, we arranged a meeting in Alameda County; the Alameda boys were very put out that the President was not coming over there. So, we arranged a meeting for the early following evening, and the President talked from the shores of Lake Merritt. We set up a meeting in just about a day's notice over there. We were successful in getting the President to stop in my home town of San Jose. I told them that I thought there would be few people there even though he was coming through at 11:30 or 12 o'clock at night, and we had no notice of it. But the President himself decided that if there was going to be a couple of thousand people down there, he'd stay up. Everybody wanted him to go to bed because he was supposed to make a speech from the back platform of the train at Santa Barbara at 6 or 6:30 the next morning, and they wanted to be sure that the President had gotten some rest. The President said to me, "If you can get 2,000 people out there, we'll make a speech." So, seeing this was a non-political trip, I raced down in my automobile, called all the newspapers, and we put on about twenty or twenty-five announcements on each one of the little radio stations in San Jose. When I got over there about 10 o'clock at night, the depot was full and they were hanging from the rafters and over fences and everything else. By the time the President arrived they had to clear the crowd out of the way to run the train into the depot. Margaret Truman came out first and I gave you the picture of Margaret waving to the crowd there in San Jose. She said a few words to the crowd, and hello to them and so forth, and the President walked out behind her and took a look at the crowd, and he said, "You ought to be a Republican." I said, "Why, Mr. President?" He says, "Two thousand people!" He said, "There must be ten thousand here!" He says, "Where did they all come from?" "Well," I said, "Mr. President, if we had a couple of days notice here I guess the train couldn't have gotten through San Jose." "Well," he said, "you should have been a Republican, two thousand people?" FUCHS: Did you have any other personal contact with the President? Do you have any anecdotes? MCENERY: We had another one that happened there. I introduced the President two or three times in two days when we went out on that "dollars for Democrats" march. I was very formal and I was watching myself, and I was always calling him "Mr. President." When I sat down after introducing him at the Fairmont Hotel at lunch to about fifteen hundred Democrats, I just got up and said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States," and I sat down. He says, "Fine." He says, "Not many people do that right." But he says, "We'll be around a day or two, you'll make a mistake." And I did just fine, for two days or two and a half, I was with him, until we were in my home town, and everybody was yelling, "Give 'em hell, Harry:" Everybody was yelling, "We want to see Harry." I was standing right in front of the microphone, didn't know it, and I said, "Harry, they want to see you down the side of the train here, will you lean over?" He said, "Give me the five bucks*" We had bet five bucks that I was going to make a mistake, and by god, I made it just before he pulled out of the depot. Well, he was always a great fellow to be around. You know, we'd get pretty serious about this politics situation and he'd kind of convince you that everything was going to be all right, no matter what was happening. He instilled a lot of confidence in anybody he was around and he was a great fighter. I think that was typical when he came out in his campaign trip in '48. Later on when we had the campaign trip, there was nothing that he and Barkley wouldn't do for us in northern California. I don't know what happened in southern California. He made his appearance down there and made his talks, but it wasn't the same as it was in northern California. The President was wanted everyplace here, and I'm not sure that in southern California they wanted him everyplace down there. I had the feeling that they kind of wanted him in the town and out. The same thing was true of Alben Barkley. They were in love with Henry Wallace and -- I told the story about us going down there with Alben Barkley. The Democratic committee down south was constantly letting out releases and so forth about Wallace and Wallace's statements. And many of them, including Jim Roosevelt, agreed with the statements made by Wallace and figured the President as wrong in the way he was proceeding in our foreign policy. They were constantly letting this stuff out down there and everything seemed to favor the Wallace stand Very few of them were giving the President the support that he needed or was entitled to. But we couldn't, in northern California, have gotten any more help from the national committee than we got. They did everything that we asked them to do. I don't know whether you ever saw any of Gael Sullivan's letters. Have you run into many of them? FUCHS: Not a lot. I remember that I've seen some of them in the files. MCENERY: Well, if you ask Gael Sullivan a question, he never wrote a letter of more than about five lines. If you ask him to do something, he'd answer you and say, "Your matter of such and such, Joe Smith or Brown, he says we'll try to clout that one out of the lot for you. We'll get to work on it right now." I guess the man used to write about a thousand letters a day with two or three lines in them. I heard afterwards at the Democratic National Committee that he used to keep two girls busy all day long, just taking letters. He used to put out so many of them that they could hardly keep up with him. It was unfortunate that Gael Sullivan wasn't around longer. He got in a little mix-up going back home one weekend. I guess you know about that? He stopped to see some of our Democrats along the line and he ran into a buttress or something, and some policeman that didn't know who he was had him arrested and the newspapers carried it as being a drunk driving charge or something like that, but he was never convicted of it. He was released afterwards, but the newspapers played it up so much that you'd think it was a tremendous crime. Anybody can have a few drinks and run into a wall. It's lucky he hit the wall and not somebody else. But Gael, he was the man that made Howard McGrath click as chairman of the party, because you've got to remember that Howard McGrath was still the United States Senator from Rhode Island, Providence; and you had a man by the name of Senator [Theodore Francis] Green there at the time, who was the other Senator, and I'm sure McGrath was doing most of the work. Although Rhode Island is a small state, it still is very close to Washington and it doesn't take them very long to get from there over to Washington to make their requests. You know that's another thing, when I first became vice-chairman of the Democratic committee, and I made a couple of trips to Washington, the first one I made I am sure that many people in Washington still thought we were chasing Indians down Market Street in San Francisco and that the Democratic Party didn't amount to very much in this state; but it can all be attributed to our own failure to do the job we should with the registration we had. Again, I come back to that terrible thing we had, that cross-filing. If we didn't have that cross-filing in California we would have had a tremendous Democratic organization. You can't do anything when the Democrats start going to the voting poll and they find nothing but Republicans on their ballot. They will make a mistake and put the "X" in the wrong place. But if we did nothing else in California, I think that the period from about ‘46 to ‘50 finished cross-filing in California. We woke everybody up to the fact that it had to be eliminated. And by God, there were a lot of talks made about it before ‘46 and they never got anyplace. FUCHS: McGrath spoke at a Jackson Day Dinner in Los Angeles on April 13, 1948, and Truman was supposed to have been snubbed by the fact that James Roosevelt never mentioned him by name. McGrath ended up tossing aside his regular speech and talking about Truman, and then he was even booed at the end. Did you happen to be there? MCENERY: No, I didn’t attend that meeting, but I know all about it. It was a terrible meeting! They didn’t even mention the president of the United States. You see the meetings that we had, any pictures that I've got, and whether it was FDR, or Truman as Vice President, the pictures were always hanging up there. Although they called them a Jefferson banquet, the only guy that ever said anything about Thomas Jefferson was myself, and maybe about two paragraphs at the start of the meeting; and from there on it was talking about our leaders, whether it was FDR or Truman. I often wondered what FDR would have thought if he was alive and found his senior son treating the Democratic President of the United States like his son treated Harry Truman. FDR expected loyalty and he got it from most of his friends. Maybe it wasn't always reciprocal, but he managed to keep them in line, anyhow. It's too bad that in this great state of California, which is now the largest state population-wise, we don't have two Democrats as United States Senators; and we ought to have about four-fifths, or almost -- there are a couple of localities, I'd say that Orange County and certain parts of Los Angeles, and maybe over in the Riverside location, might have a Republican Congressman there shouldn't be over three or four of them in California. We were just lucky we came out of that last one the way we did, even to have the kind of a Democrat that we got; and even at that, he was one of the guys that was picking on Johnson all the time. I don't know how we can be in a position to know the facts to criticize the President on what he's doing on his foreign policy. I hear an awful lot of criticism of Nixon today in Vietnam, and I feel very much like every American ought to support him in what he's doing and if we have to get out of there let's see if we can't do it with some honor. If we have to keep fighting someplace, and it's the national policy, we ought to go along with it. I don't think that our foreign policy can be made up in the streets of Los Angeles or San Francisco, or Santa Clara County. Because all you've got to do is see the problems that Truman had with his formation of the United Nations, and even the problems they have every day in the United Nations, even to the financing of the organization. FUCHS: I believe Judge Oliver Carter was selected at the state convention, after the ’48 national convention to be state central committee chairman. Have you any remarks about him and the way he ran the campaign in California for the Democrats? MCENERY: There's nobody that knew California any better than Ollie Carter did. And Ollie Carter was a very calm, reasonable fellow, he had years of experience in the Senate. He started in up there when Senator John Foley, Senator Jack Shelley and Ollie Carter were the only three Democrats in the Senate. They put through a lot of good legislation that was sponsored by those people, and Ollie knew the art of compromising. Ollie did a wonderful job for the campaign in northern California; but, I think if you would ask Ollie himself, that he would say that he wasn't successful in doing the things that he wanted in southern California. The money wasn't forthcoming down there. They should have collected their own money. The last $150,000 raised in northern California went to southern California and it was given to a committee of men from the movie industry. What did they call it -- the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. At that time a fellow by the name of [Ronald] Reagan, was executive secretary, or president of the theater union; and he and a number of others in that particular committee handled -- along with George Luckey in southern California -- the distribution of the money that we raised in northern California, that was sent to southern California, because there was nothing happening down there, other than what George Luckey and a few of his people were doing. Roosevelt went through the motions when he came back in, saying he was for the President, and we had to support the ticket and everything; but I think you will find his actions became nil in comparison with what it was before, when he was promoting himself. He did ride with the President in the parade when he came down to Los Angeles. FUCHS: What principal issues do you think might have swung California into the Democratic column in 1948? MCENERY: I think it was President Truman's campaign and his fight and making the 80th Congress the issue, the so-called "Do-nothing Congress." I think he was successful in convincing the people that if the Republicans came into power they would not have the assistance that they were being given agriculturally, and in a water way, and in many other things. He made it clear in California what the Democratic Party had done for labor, what it had done to bring water to California, what it had done for Agriculture, what they had done for the homeowners through the years, saving their homes as I was saying earlier about the Homeowners Loan Corporation. The Frazier-Lemke Act saved thousands of ranches in California for the old owners that had held them for years. I feel that the President, practically with his own power, was able to do more than anybody else to sell the California voters on the fact that they should vote Democratic and vote for him. I told you about the couple of things that I felt. One was that the Sacramento Bee had more to do with turning things around in the San Joaquin Valley. I think the San Joaquin Valley was going Republican if the Bee had not come out for him. There was a man by the name of Jones that was the editor of the Sacramento Bee at the time, I don't remember what his first name was. He was a real good editorial writer himself, and Miss MacClatchy, of course -- there's a story, and I'm sure it's correct, that Mr. MacClatchy, the man who started the Sacramento Bee, the grandfather, was in favor of public ownership of utilities and Government assistance that they have given for the developing of natural resources. I think that Truman's speech that he made in Sacramento when he first entered the state there in that non-political trip was the thing that turned them around and tht* in turn saved the state for Truman. His ride through the San Joaquin Valley on that whistlestop was a tremendous thing, and Ollie Carter was with him every inch of the way on that; and I'm sure that Ollie Carter is no amateur at politics. He knows chat makes the public feel the way they do about certain things and he seems to know how to express it. I think that he was a tower of strength on that whistlestop all through California, and although my makeup is altogether different, no one, including Ollie Carter, could have done anything with the period that we went through in '46 and '47 and early '48, and up to convention time with Jim Roosevelt. The only thing you could do with Jim Roosevelt was just stay away from him, and we felt that if we kept our own house in order in northern California that we were doing all we could. We had good loyal people down there such as Congressman [Harry Richard] Sheppard, and people of that type, that kept us informed of what was going on, but we couldn't do anything about it. In southern California, you've got to remember that those cities run right into each other and the populations are tremendous in all of them. They don't have the organization down there that they were able to organize here in northern California. Even the Republicans today have trouble down there. They don't seem to be able to get the cohesion down there that they do in northern California. FUCHS: Have you any further anecdotes about the September campaign of Mr. Truman in San Francisco, or any other place in California you might have come in touch with him? MCENERY: Well, my memory doesn't serve me too well here, it’s come on so fast. FUCHS: What about the incident in connection with the Union Club in September? MCENERY: Oh, that was when we were going out. Yeah, that's quite an interesting story. We were going out that day for the "dollars for Democrats" and the large Union League Club that’s across the street from the Fairmont Hotel -- they always told the story that whenever Truman, or for that matter any Democrat, but more particularly Truman, came they always used to pull down all the shades on the side of the Club that faced the Fairmont Hotel. And Truman said when we were across the street starting down California Street, going out with our cans trying to get the dollars for Democrats, that he wanted to walk down. We got down past the front of the Union League Club and a little park that's across the street, and Truman said, "Let's walk down here and see if the shades are down on this side too." And we did; we walked down a little ways, and the shades weren't down, and he says, "Well, I guess that's right, they only pull them down on the Fairmont Hotel side, they don't want the President to look in," something to that effect. It was rather odd that the President should want to walk a half a block down to see if the shades were pulled down. FUCHS: This was the big businessmen's intended insult to Mr. Truman? MCENERY: That's right, they didn't want to even see him. They didn't want to see him and they didn't want him even to look in on the Club. Well, we had another one on one of these trips; President Truman being the Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge in Missouri, was rather anxious to see the new Masonic Temple on California Street in the city. I had heard that only the members could go in and we were with President Truman and he says, "Come on, we're going to go in and look at their ritual," what would you call it, their ritual pieces. I said something about, "Well, I thought only members were supposed to go in." He said, "Just keep quiet, and you'll see something a Catholic never saw before." So, we marched in and they opened up the safe and they took all their ritualistic stuff and much of it Truman made a lot over it, but it didn't mean anything to me. I didn't know what it was particularly, but there was a lot of talk about it, and Truman saw their new auditorium, it's a beautiful building. It was just new, see, when he was making this trip out here. But, I don't know, there was five or six of us, we all walked in that day with the President and saw the whole inside of the building. Oh, another one, when I went to the city that morning I was successful in getting them to make the stop in San Jose. Everybody was against it. I got there about 7:30 in the morning and I knocked at the door and Margaret Truman answered the door. The security men were out on the outside and I had been thoroughly cleared. I had been around with them for a few days and they knew very well who I was, so I asked them was the President up and they said, "Oh, he's been out for the walk already, and he's back." Well, I saw the afternoon papers, it was full of him. They always liked to take pictures of the President going on his walk and he usually was rather humorous on all them. He used to kid the newspaper guys along on whether they could keep up with him and so forth. But I knocked at the door and Margaret answered the door and she said, "Good morning, Mr. McEnery," or something like that. I had driven up from San Jose. I had gone home and gone to bed and came back up the next morning, and I was quite anxious naturally to have the President stop in my hometown. So, a couple of fellows were sitting in the living room there, and I heard somebody call out from the other room there, "Who is that?" or something like that. Margaret said, "It's Mr. McEnery,” and Mr. Truman took one step out into the hall and he was in his woolen underwear, and he was shaving with the old -- I don't know whether it was a straight edge or safety edge razor, he had whiskers all over; and after he went out on the walk he evidently came back and did his shaving, he didn't do it before he went out for the walk. This was when we got into the conversation, a little later on after he came out of the room, everybody was against him stopping in San Jose. The President said, "Well, if there's two thousand people there we're going to stop." That finished it, the stop was arranged after that. But I never thought I’d see a President of the United States shaving himself at 7:30 in the morning. FUCHS: The Independent Progressive Party of California had some strength in 1947, were you apprehensive about the inroads that they might make? MCENERY: Oh, we were! In ’47 we were more afraid than we were as we headed to the election. FUCHS: Why was that? MCENERY: They seemed to hit a peak and they seemed to be going downhill. The first real commotion was caused when Wallace made his trips out here, after he had been dismissed from the Cabinet. Truman, if the newspaper polls are correct, was about at his lowest ebb then. You couldn't help but read the papers and realize that it was going to be rough. But it looked a lot rougher in ’47 than it did when we came up to the convention, I think that Ollie Carter and I had talks about that at various times. It felt to him that way, too, that they had shown their real strength too soon and it was petering out a little bit. Maybe, again, it was true on account of the fight that Truman was putting on. I always felt that the Republicans were very upset about, and so was Congress, being called back into session after the Democratic convention; but, after all, they had adopted a platform that almost said that they were for everything that Truman had asked them to do and they didn't do it. There was only one thing left for the President to do, was to find out did they want to do it or didn't they? They had had their convention before ours and they again came out for all of these things. So Truman made it plain in his acceptance speech that if they felt that way they should have voted that way. If they still felt that way after their convention, he'd call them back into session; he'd ask them to do these things that they said they wanted to do in that platform. I think that was a tremendous stroke of strategy. I don't know who finally made up their mind that they were going to do that, but if I'm any judge of Harry Truman, he most likely had the final word on that. I think that that particular line of his acceptance speech got more of a rousing reception than anything else he said. In fact, it was almost as great as the reception that Alben Barkley got when he talked about the Republican spider. When he said the spider was so weak when the Republicans were in that he couldn't hardly weave a web. Alben said that when they were critical about the Democrats and said that spider webs were on everything. Well, he said that they were so weak they couldn't weave a web when the Re-publicans were in there. I think that if you'd say anybody other than Truman won the election in California, or anybody did anything that was of tremendous significance in that election, outside of Truman's campaigning through California and his whistlestops and his trip down through San Joaquin Valley, I think you'd be wrong in giving credit to the Democratic organization, the Democratic leaders, the guys that put up the money or anything else. I think that it was Truman and Truman alone that practically won California for the Democratic Party. I think that's a pretty good place to stop unless you've got some other questions? FUCHS: Well, I have some more but we can continue later. [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Additional McEnery Oral History Trans |
